I'm sorry if I put you off psybbo.
In terms of this thread, I'm inclined to believe that when someone fails at Maths then it says more about the way they were taught that anything else. Interpreting a question like this should be easy -- if it's not, then more than likely it was never explained to you properly.
I'm currently tutoring a student in the Scottish equivalent of GCSE. I see the same sort of thing there... we were looking last week at quadratic equations. I gave him a problem like x^2-7x+12=0 and he could solve them fairly quickly... but later I showed him the problem "2x^2=0" and he stared blankly at it for a few seconds before offering up "2? 1?"... it's just x=0. If he can "solve" the first problem, and not the second, then it would be suggestive that, really, he has no idea what's going on and is just blindly following a procedure laid out for him by the teacher without knowing where it comes from, why it works, that sort of thing.
It seems clear that maths has been taught rather badly for some time now, if two separate generations have been stumped by a problem that needn't be difficult. I hope this doesn't come across as disrespectful.